


The Lives that Could Have Been

by seashadows



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, F/M, House Baratheon, House Greyjoy, House Stark, House Targaryen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 05:59:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1847002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seashadows/pseuds/seashadows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Catelyn Tully: five lives lived in five Houses. </p><p>Plus one where she had no House at all. </p><p>For <a href="http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com/22142.html?thread=15148414#t15148414">this</a> prompt on the ASoIaF kink meme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lives that Could Have Been

_House Targaryen_

Like the child that her older sister carries, Cataelyn Targaryen was born after her father’s death. 

That, however, is where the similarities end. 

She never knew Jaehaerys, but everyone – from Ser Ilyn, before his tongue was cut out, to her brother Aerys in better times – has assured her all her life that he was a kind, intelligent man and a wise king. Aerys, on the other hand, is nothing like their father. Even though his death came with the near-ruin of her family at the hands of her nephew and cousin, Cataelyn can’t help but think that Rhaella’s child will be better off for Aerys no longer existing. 

That still leaves the problem of Cataelyn herself, at least in Robert Baratheon’s eyes. She likes to think that Aerys at least valued her enough to keep her as a hostage in the Red Keep, like Elia and her children, rather than send her to Dragonstone with Rhaella and Viserys – but she has to admit that, in the confusion of battles and his own insanity, Aerys likely forgot about her in favor of more important things. She was still in the castle when Tywin Lannister took King’s Landing, hiding with Pycelle, and now she lives where Elia, Rhaenys, and Aegon died. 

Robert will have none of that, and although he lets her live, he refuses to marry her or even to keep her in King’s Landing, as his adviser Jon Arryn suggests. “Dragonspawn,” he calls her, and day after day sees him deliberating between threats to send her to the Free Cities and equally-frightening threats to send her to the Wall and see what the men of the Night’s Watch do with her. 

Eddard Stark finally comes up with a solution, one that neither the new king nor Cataelyn has anticipated. “I will marry her, Your Grace,” he says quietly to Robert one day, kneeling before the king on the Iron Throne as Cataelyn watches from the other end of the Great Hall. “Lysa Tully has married Jon Arryn in place of my brother Brandon, and I have no other prospects. Any children she bears will be in the North and out of the line of succession.”

Robert gapes, sputters, and turns purple, but after a few minutes of this evidence that he’s thinking, he comes down from the throne and hugs his friend. “Well, you’re a man now, Ned,” he says, and within a week, Lord Stark weds Cataelyn in a small ceremony at the Red Keep’s royal sept. 

He has no family cloak with him, so a plain gray one must suffice to cover Cataelyn in place of the elaborate Targaryen cloak she wears to the ceremony. She knows that she should be afraid, wedding this man who names Robert Baratheon as his greatest friend, but there is no malice in Eddard Stark’s eyes when he declares the ceremonial love for her in front of gods and men. There is likely no love, either, but having lived through the wrath of both Aerys Targaryen and Robert Baratheon, Cataelyn will gladly accept a neutral husband. 

He does not take her maidenhead after the bedding ceremony, either. Instead, he sits with her in their temporary bedchamber and tells her the truth about what he found in the Tower of Joy, and about how the baby his sister bore is now his to claim. “Through Rhaegar and Lyanna, he is family to both of us,” he says. “My nephew, and the son of yours.”

Cataelyn knows she should be insulted. For the rest of her life, she will be known as the wife of Eddard Stark, a man who trysted with Ashara Dayne, wed Cataelyn Targaryen out of duty, and had a son with a woman who was neither of them. Instead, she pities the tiny baby that Eddard brought to the Red Keep, dark-haired and squalling and, in truth, fatherless as well as motherless. He may not be hers, but Eddard is right in that he is their family now. 

“My lord husband may raise his natural son as he sees fit,” she says, to show that she understands. And on the first night of their journey north to Winterfell, she and Eddard Stark begin to try for a son of their own. 

_House Greyjoy_

All of her brothers hate her mother, and so Catla Greyjoy does, too. 

Tamlyn Piper is a greenlander, and her maester killed her husband’s son Urrigon with his useless tricks. Those things would be enough to curse her to the Storm God, which the four surviving Greyjoy sons do on a regular basis anyway. But her failure to give Quellon Greyjoy any strong sons is insult on top of injury; his only offspring with the Piper woman are Robin, who died when he was only a few years old, and Catla: alive, thriving, and clearly Greyjoy in her height and her pale eyes, but female. 

Catla makes a point of staying far away from her mother as soon as she’s old enough to realize what the differences between the Ironborn and the greenlanders are. Greenlanders are weak, her brother Euron tells her throughout her childhood, and stupid. Most of them are barely fit to be salt wives, never mind Greyjoy wives. She always winces at that point in his speech, half-expecting him to aim a swing at her head like he does when he and Aeron have been drinking, but instead, he always smiles and pulls on the end of her long auburn braid. “It’s a good thing we got you away from your mother before you could go soft and stupid,” he tells her, every time. “We’ll make a good Ironborn girl out of you.”

Her mother dies when she is ten years old, and from then on, Catla’s brothers raise her. Although she has no ship of her own, she fights with Euron on his, and learns how to take the iron price on the lush shores of Ironman’s Bay. Aeron teaches her how to drink ale like a true Ironborn, and laughs at her when she nearly throws her guts up after six tankards. During the months when she’s with Victarion on his ships, she learns from him how to stand strong in the face of a storm and laugh at thunderheads, not caring whether or not she gets wet. The Drowned God and the Storm God can battle it out, but she has the sea. 

Balon keeps his distance, and Catla understands. He’s more than a decade older than she is, and the heir to Pyke on top of that, and he was a man grown and wedded when Catla was little more than an infant. His eldest son is only five years younger than his sister, and his Harlaw-born wife is more concerned with her own children than with her good-father’s. Catla doesn’t bother him much, instead trying to live up to his name in deeds rather than words. Her attempts to climb the Flint Cliffs of the North lead to a fall that nearly breaks her neck when she’s six-and-ten, and jovial fame in the alehouses of Lordsport thereafter. 

Men of Botley, Blacktyde, and Goodbrother ask for her hand, but she is still unmarried at five-and-twenty when Balon starts a war to take back the kingdom that their people once ruled. Catla reaves with Victarion and Euron down the coast of the Westerlands and shouts with joy when ships and people alike burn at their hands, and mourns Aeron in her heart when his own ship sinks. 

“What is dead may never die,” she and her brothers pray, but she doesn’t know if she believes it. Maybe it’s the greenlander in her, even after all these years of trying to swim it out; that thought frightens her, and makes her fight doubly hard at Pyke when the Baratheon king’s fleet overtakes her people’s abilities. 

It’s there that she meets Eddard Stark of Winterfell, and takes a liking to his bearing and his fighting ways. She makes him her salt husband under a cover of moldering driftwood by the cliffs, and when the war ends, he takes her home as his wife in return. 

_House Baratheon_

It was Robert’s idea in the beginning, but it turns into an even trade to bind their Houses together: Lyanna Stark for Robert Baratheon, and Catelyn Baratheon for Eddard Stark. Then Rhaegar Targaryen steals Lyanna, Lysa Tully marries Jon Arryn instead of Ned’s brother, and all thoughts of married life are torn to shreds by the necessity of keeping alliances together.

Marriage, of course, is the last thing on Ned’s mind. He and Catelyn wed quickly when it became clear that Robert stood a good chance of killing all of them in his rage at Brandon and Ned’s summons to King’s Landing, and if he couldn’t protect his sister from Rhaegar, he could at least keep one promise to a woman he cherished before he died. 

Now he’s faced with the job of explaining Jon Snow to a woman who may be stronger than he is, with Baratheon eyes, Estermont hair, and two older brothers who could collectively rip him limb from limb if he dishonors her. Not to mention the bloodshed that Robert will inevitably cause if he finds out what really happened. He’s not sure if it’s cowardice or loss that makes him come up with this version of the lie, but it’s close enough to the truth of his nephew’s heritage that his heart squeezes in pain as he says it. 

“Brandon got him on a Southron woman before he died,” he says after motioning Jon’s wet nurse from the room. _A sibling’s child – that’s truth enough, and by all the gods, it hurts._ “I – I have a duty to him. He has no family but me and mine.”

Catelyn doesn’t strike him, as Robert would. She doesn’t glare at him and grit her teeth, as Stannis would, or pout like Renly. Instead, she silently rises from her chair and comes to stand near Ned, staring at Jon for a long time. 

“I wish he didn’t have to stay here,” she says at last, her words as blunt as her brothers’. “He is not my son.”

“I know,” Ned says. As conversations with Baratheons go, this is better than he expected. Catelyn isn’t crying or shouting, or doing anything that she would have a right to do as a wife presented with someone else’s bastard in her own home. 

“ _My_ brother is more of a whore than yours was,” she says, and looks at Ned. Her mouth is firm, and the look in her eyes is resigned. “He probably has more natural children than I have fingers and toes. If there’s anything those children have taught me, it’s that their lives are not their fault.”

“No,” Ned agrees. Jon gurgles and kicks in his arms, and smiles up at Catelyn, showing his four teeth. _He takes after his mother._

“Bastards are _blameless_ for their parents’ mistakes,” Catelyn says. She touches Jon’s cheek gently with one hand. “No, I don’t like it. But he has a right to stay here.”

“Winterfell is his home,” Ned says, “just as it is mine. And yours.”

Catelyn smiles then. “And our son’s,” she tells him. 

At first, Ned doesn’t understand at all – and then he does. “Ours?” She nods. “But we only – the bedding…”

Catelyn’s smile turns into an enormous grin. “I called him Robb, after my brother,” she says, and takes Ned’s hand. Ned steadies the baby against his chest and moves to follow her, his heart pounding. _My son._ “He’ll be overjoyed when he hears.”

She leads him from the solar to a room that Ned recognizes as his childhood bedchamber, and scoops a sleeping baby of a year or so old from the cradle inside. “I expect that Robert will send us a warhammer for him when he hears of this,” she says. 

Robb is nearly as bald as an egg, but what hair he has is as soft as Jon’s, somewhere between Catelyn’s bright auburn and Ned’s brown. He wakes as soon as Jon reaches out a hand and pokes him in the eye, and Ned has a split second to observe that he inherited Catelyn’s Baratheon-blue eyes before Robb demonstrates that he is just as loud as his namesake uncle. 

Ned isn’t quite sure how he’s going to survive. 

  
_House Stark_

Callara Stark looks almost nothing like her siblings, and she’s glad. Nothing else distinguishes her – dutiful Callara, stuck between Brandon and Eddard on one side and Lyanna and Benjen on the other. Ladylike Callara, who shows nothing of the wolf’s blood that Lyanna so gleefully demonstrates, who likes to sew and embroider and knit. 

She likes herself, and she enjoys learning how to be the lady of a house, but sometimes, her brothers and sister make her feel so small. Eddard is quiet like her, and he doesn’t like to misbehave, but he’s been away in the Eyrie for years. Brandon is wild and brash, beloved by everyone, and Lyanna is just like him. Benjen doesn’t do much, either, but he’s the baby; Mother and Father think that everything he does is just wonderful. 

Every one of them has dark brown hair and icy eyes, except for Callara. She has pale skin and a long jaw, like them, but her hair is auburn and her eyes are bright blue, and any resemblance tends to be forgotten when people see that. Mother says that the red in her hair comes from her own mother, Lady Arya of House Flint, who died when Brandon was only a baby. She says that blue eyes are Northern, too, and tells Callara that she should look at the color of the bright sky above the godswood if she wants proof. 

Mother likes Callara’s hair. Her sister won’t wear braids, but Callara will, and sometimes Mother comes to her room to brush her hair and braid it or make it into a bun. “You’re a Stark, sweetling, even if you don’t think so,” she says one day when Callara is ten, holding the length of Callara’s hair in one hand and a brush in the other. “Remember our words.”

“Winter is coming,” Callara says. 

“That’s right. You’re strong enough to stand tall when it comes. Lyanna has the wolf’s blood, but that’s not the only thing you need to help people stay alive when it’s cold.”

“It isn’t?”

“Of course not. Who do you think kept House Stark alive during the Long Winter?”

Callara squints, trying to remember if the maester told her that in lessons. “Swordsmen,” she guesses. 

Lyarra Stark laughs. “Yes, but mostly, it was the women of House Stark, and the men who stayed behind. Someone had to close the doors and bar them, and someone had to take the children into protected rooms so the Others couldn’t find them. We are alive because Stark women made clothes and fires and food, so that people wouldn’t die.”

But in the end, Mother is wrong. No matter how hard Callara works, she can’t prevent death from coming to Winterfell. Mother sickens and dies six years after that conversation, and Father brings the four Stark children still living at home south to Harrenhal out of grief. 

It’s there that Lyanna defends Howland Reed’s honor at swordpoint and in borrowed armor, and is crowned the Queen of Love and Beauty the next day. 

It’s there that Callara sees King Aerys for the first time, and shivers at the pure madness in his eyes – so much so that she is almost unsurprised when the king demands her brother Eddard’s life a year later in response to Brandon’s rashness. 

It’s there that her brother Ned falls in love with Ashara Dayne, so much so that Father is considering asking for her hand when the war begins. 

Father dies. Brandon dies, and in his absence, Ned marries Lysa Tully at Riverrun before riding south to fight with Robert Baratheon. Although Jon Arryn swears his loyalty to Robert’s cause, Ned still offers him Callara’s hand to ensure it. 

Callara knows that she has no other choice. She says the vows in Riverrun’s sept beside her brother, although she doesn’t mean them – what could the Seven know of a girl’s heart, if that girl worshipped the Old Gods? – and Hoster Tully allows her to stay at Riverrun with his own daughter until the war ends. 

Lyanna dies, too. Callara wouldn’t believe that of her sister, not with Lyanna’s spirit and love for life, but she can’t deny the truth when Ned comes to Riverrun to reunite with his wife and sister. In a wagon, he carries a box of Lyanna’s bones. 

She would give anything now to go back to a time when she didn’t matter. Instead, she has to travel to King’s Landing to live as the wife of a man four times her age, a man of whom she knows nothing other than descriptions in Ned’s letters. Although Jon Arryn is kind, Callara still cries herself to sleep after he does his duty in their bed. 

_I should be grateful_ , she tells herself every day as she avoids Cersei Lannister’s glare and Robert Baratheon’s longing looks. _I am an Arryn now._ But in knowing all that she has lost, she can’t help but think that she will never be as strong as a Stark again. 

_House Uller_

Catrine is surprised to learn, at the age of twelve, that her father has a bastard daughter. She knows that Lord Harmen is just as fiery as their House’s sigil and rumors about the Dornish would make him out to be, but she always thought that he preferred venting his famous Uller fire on the battlefield to doing it in bed. 

Her half-sister’s name is Ellaria Sand, a name that Catrine thinks is wonderful. Although Ellaria doesn’t live at Hellholt, she visits a few times, and every time, she manages to make Catrine feel like an ugly little mouse. Ellaria looks like a true Dornishwoman, black-haired and strong-featured, while Catrine takes after House Wyl like her mother. There’s nothing distinctive in her face; she’s auburn-haired and blue-eyed, with fair eyebrows and a tiny nose that looks like the bad end of a carrot. 

Catrine’s mother is polite to her half-sister when she visits, calling her ‘Mistress Ellaria’ and remarking on how much she’s grown since her last visit. It’s clear that she doesn’t see Ellaria as a member of the family, but that’s perfectly proper – after all, Ellaria isn’t. She’s a few years older than Catrine, and Catrine works out that Ellaria was probably conceived before her mother and father were even betrothed. 

“I can’t imagine Father bedding anyone,” she says shyly to Ellaria one day, “not even Mother. Or your mother. He’s so very _old_.” That makes Ellaria burst out laughing and agree with her, and Catrine quickly forgets her shyness. 

She loses track of Ellaria for a long time after that, only hearing about her after the war. Her sister, as it turns out, has taken up with _Oberyn Martell_ , of all people, and her father laughs so hard when he hears that he nearly breaks a rib. Catrine can’t tell if he’s more ashamed or more proud for her; she thinks it’s both. His bastard is the hottest-tempered Prince of Dorne’s paramour, true, but for an _Uller_ bastard to be a Prince’s paramour at all – well, people will remember that. 

Catrine thinks that she would probably be proud, too, if she were old enough to have a bastard with a mind of her own. Worse things have been said of House Uller, after all. 

Ellaria soon disappears from her concerns, though, as Catrine takes Lord Manwoody’s younger son as a husband and begins to take on more tasks as the heir of her House. Lord Harmen is still healthy, but he is aging, and Catrine takes over management of Hellholt’s incomes and servants to allow him some rest. Even pregnant with her children, heavy and uncomfortable in the dry heat, she makes sure to go out onto the streets of Hellholt herself to ensure that the smallfolk will already know her when the time comes for her to rule the castle. 

Then war breaks out in Westeros, and Catrine waits, frightened, for her husband to be called to fight as her father was fifteen years ago. But this time, Dorne stays out of it, remaining peaceful for the two years that it takes for the Westerlands to slice the life out of the Riverlands and the North. The Reach goes over to their side, of course, and she, along with everyone else she knows, is disgusted as well as completely unsurprised. 

But it isn’t until Oberyn Martell’s body comes back to Dorne in pieces that the Dornish truly rise up – once again, in defense of their own. Catrine couldn’t care less if the rest of Westeros hacked itself to shreds north of the Boneway, but Gregor Clegane is a monstrous butcher and he’s killed Martells before. She suspects that the spear that Prince Oberyn used wasn’t exactly _clean_ , but even that thought is little comfort. 

Prince Oberyn’s family is the angriest of all, and Catrine inwardly applauds them. She feels for poor Myrcella Baratheon when Darkstar mutilates her face on her party’s way to Hellholt; had they arrived, she would have been proud to stand in the great hall and watch Princess Arianne take Westeros’s future into her own, as well as Princess Myrcella’s, hands. 

Nevertheless, it’s the successful arrival of someone else close to the Martells that truly makes Catrine smile. “Sister,” she says when Ellaria arrives, youngest daughter in tow, and hugs her tightly. “Tell me what I can do to help you.”

And Ellaria smiles, too. 

_The Free Folk_

Just like her ancestors for as far back as she can remember, Cat is Free Folk to her flesh and bones. She was born in the shadow of a weirwood in the middle of her village, as so many of her people’s villages have been built for thousands of years, and Eddr stole her away through the trees of the Haunted Forest when she was even younger than Sansa is now. Those trees are as familiar to her as the growing lines on her man’s face, and as much home to her as her thatched house beyond the Wall. 

If her blood is her joy, then Sansa is her pride: a young spearwife in deed as well as in name, four-and-ten and kissed by fire. Her daughter is as beautiful as a sunset over the Frostfangs, but allows no one to steal her, and makes no secret of the fact that _she_ will be doing the stealing when she finds someone she loves. Cat’s boys are still young enough to sleep in the furs with their mother and father, but her daughter is nearly a woman – she bled a year past and can wield her long spear as well as Cat herself. 

She proves herself well when the Others move down on the Free Folk from places unknown, and everyone flees to the Mance to fight the crows for a life away from the danger. Sansa kills a shadowcat a moon’s turn away from the Wall, and gives it to Cat to wear. “Fits, with yer name,” she tells her mother proudly, even as blood – her own and the cat’s – dries on her forehead and arms. “It’s yours.” Then she laughs and chases her youngest brother Ryk down the frosty ground between the tents, still something of a child in spite of her age and skill. 

Cat is wearing the shadowcat skin when a crow’s arrow takes Eddr through the neck from the top of the Wall and his head falls off his shoulders. Sansa screams, and keeps herself on her feet, but it’s Cat who feeds his body to the fire the Free Folk build that day. Ryk and Brand she keeps away from the flames, but Sansa stands with her and watches, her hand in Cat’s and her mouth set like her father’s. 

They survive after that, somehow. Jon Snow gives them land on the Gift, and Cat rebuilds their home some leagues south of the Wall. It’s small, and it’s colder in the south lands than she would have thought possible, but she and her children are alive. 

Brand and Ryk grow up by her side, and Sansa steals herself a son of the Giantsbane for her man. They live, and it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I fiddled with the ages in one or two of these.


End file.
